Engadget has follow-ups to comments recently attributed to Ben Krasnow about plans for Steam hardware. Ben says he was misquoted (or mistranslated) and that he did not confirm Linux support and he does not think they will be showing off anything of the sort this year as reported (thanks HARDOCP). Meanwhile, there's an interview with Valve's Gabe Newell on The Verge where the Valve honcho talks of how they are working with many hardware partners on "Good, Better," or "Best" boxes for playing Steam games, and also goes ahead and says they will be releasing Linux-based "Steam boxes," among other things, also discussing their interest in low-latency controllers, biometric controllers, and other cutting edge-ness. This includes much discussion of open versus closed systems.

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I get that, but I don't really see how this is going to succeed to the point where everyone is using a steambox, rather than a normal console.

It doesn't necessarily have to cannibalize their own users and directly compete with consoles to succeed, it has a lot of crossover market appeal. The greedy comment is really silly, all products are designed to make money. It's how they go about doing it that matters and that remains to be seen in this case. Valve has a pretty good history of consumer value and customer friendly decisions so I'm not worried.

Yup.It isn't about making everyone use a Steambox, it's about getting people that prefer consoles to start using Steam. Those already using Steam on their desktop/laptop will still do that and Valve will still happily serve them and take their money.

There's a certain paranoia I keep seeing where certain people think everything is designed to screw them over or make a change they don't like and don't want. Some things are aimed at people that simply aren't you. There's a direct correlation between these people and ones that use things like "kiddie gamers" to talk about console gamers. These people are incredibly quick to talk about how different they are from other gamers yet don't think Valve is smart enough to realize this, too.

Valve isn't envisioning a world where everyone uses the Steambox. Valve is just envisioning a world where every gamer uses Steam.

Multiple skus, Linux os, somehow I just don't see the console crowd running out and embracing what's essentially a porting of steam over to a mini PC. I get what they want to do out of this, I just don't see the overall point of it.